


White Snow in Midsummer

by tolstayas



Category: Versailles (TV 2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, F/F, Season/Series 03 Spoilers, Snow White Elements, again very much a pretentious aesthetic fic with exactly one(1) plot event......very on brand, its also EXTREMELY cheesy, its the magical realism of fairytale aus, not really au but sort of au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-25
Updated: 2018-07-25
Packaged: 2019-06-16 03:13:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,676
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15427788
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tolstayas/pseuds/tolstayas
Summary: Once upon a time in midsummer, as pale sunlight streamed through the rich curtains of the most lavish of royal bedrooms, a Queen lay dying.In which all they needed was a small miracle.





	White Snow in Midsummer

**Author's Note:**

  * For [zanate](https://archiveofourown.org/users/zanate/gifts).



Once upon a time in midsummer, as pale sunlight streamed through the rich curtains of the most lavish of royal bedrooms, a Queen lay dying.

She was as white as snow, as red as blood, and as black as ebony wood, and she lived in a grand palace full of mirrors, where she could not escape from anyone - least of all herself - even as she died.

Of all the courtiers and diplomats who lied and cheated their ways through the halls of that palace, there were very few she would not have preferred to escape from. Herself, more so than any of them.

This she thought, in a sort of almost-divine moment of near-clarity, on her deathbed, as her eyes fell closed and her breathing slowed. She felt herself give in to it, resigned, even grateful, like a sacrifice; a morbid sort of grace.

She had wanted to be awake as she died, and so it was. She had yearned for this clarity, this feeling of illumination, especially here, especially now... She had thought about it, often, more often than she liked to admit. Perhaps, when life did not bear thinking about, it was better to imagine death. Safer.

It became a sort of ritual, a sort of regular fantasy. She imagined thousands of different deaths, all of them her own; thousands of different arrangements of chairs and flowers in rooms populated by myriad collections of mourners. In some the King, her husband, held her body in his arms; in some, he stood by the window, and though his face was turned away, a trembling in his shoulders revealed that he was weeping for her.

In some he was absent.

Sometimes she would snap out of such fantasies abruptly, angry at herself, fearing such vanity would be the beginning of her end. But more often she would let it wash over her, because there was not very much that could distract her from all the things around her that she needed distracting from, and if it gave her room to breathe, maybe it was not to be condemned, after all.

Now, dying, she wondered ever so briefly if this might be another daydream.

Yet what good were these thoughts if she died with them, locked up in a buried body? What good was a revelation that came too late? In her fantasies she would always have someone to beckon closer, an ear to whisper into. Sometimes it would be her husband, who would - out of jealousy or respect - tell no one what he heard. Other times it was the chambermaid, who would tell everyone, and understand nothing.

But most of the time it was someone else entirely.

She remembered the first moments - perhaps one always remembered the beginning at the end. But what she recalled was the beginning of them, not of herself.

So rare, in these mirrored halls, to find someone of her own mind, whose heart fit so naturally beside her own that it was hard to imagine they had ever been apart. So rare, and so strange, and so, so lovely.

It was like this. The looking-glass palace had a way of drawing people in, of making them its own, of molding them to fit whatever role it pleased. What people did in the palace they would never have imagined doing outside of it. Inside the palace, everyone belonged to the palace; all their loyalties lay there, and with no one else; all their pride and dignity was offered up for whatever they imagined they might receive in return.

Everyone - but a few.

A very few of the occupants of the palace, brought there by others' wishes and their own bad luck, did not belong to the palace at all, or anywhere near it; but in some other, purer home, too far away to return to, too close to forget.

They, too, played a role. They were the martyrs of the palace, its islands of purity, its beggars and its complainers, those who prayed and those who wept. Their task was to be gentle and quiet in the face of everything that was intolerable to them; to give crucial advice, inevitably rejected in favour of some other, more impulsive decision; to fold their hands and to lower their eyes; to exist, without ever being completely alive.

Of course, being, by definition, out of place in this palace with its lists of names and roles and rules, they would find it impossible to follow all of these instructions. Sometimes they would get upset and raise their voices; or demand, in some public, embarrassing way, that they be listened to; or, in short, make it undeniably clear that they were, in fact, just as human, just as alive as everyone else.

The Queen was one of these tragic, symbolic unfortunates; another was the Princess Liselotte.

The two of them were a rare and powerful force, hidden away in the folds of dresses and behind the doors of apartments. They spoke to each other of things no pamphlet could ever contain, of things that were theirs and theirs alone - and yet, these same things were also ones that could taint a King, shock a nation, smash a mirror.

And sometimes - rarely - they dropped character. Sometimes masks shattered. Sometimes they, too, fell prey to the charm - or perhaps the isolation - of the palace, in their own ways.

Even incorruptibles can be corrupted; especially incorruptibles.

Even a Queen can kiss a Princess; especially a Queen...

It goes without saying that it was the Princess who, in the Queen's fantasies, most often leaned down to hear her most final, most lucid confession. And it goes without saying that, more often than not, it had something to do with love.

But of course, the most essential condition for such fantasies was frustration, and impossibility, and incompleteness; and of course the Princess arrived a moment too late, and the Queen had already turned to stone with waiting for her.

The Princess was silent - silent with shock, and grief, and, as always in such moments, a sort of unsourceable, inexplicable guilt.

The room was full of mourners.

The room was full of mourners, but the Princess felt completely alone, her heart heavy and cold in the hands she held over her chest.

The room was full of mourners, but she knelt at the Queen's bedside, and touched her face with trembling fingers. She cupped a pale cheek, and did what, in life, had always been a hidden thing, secret and forbidden; but that now, in death, or rather half-death, was public, open, free.

She lowered her head, and pressed her lips to the Queen's.

Their kiss had always been stolen - from time's flow, from their lives, from the submissive kind of peace they were instructed to cultivate. But now it was given back, and everything was returned to where it had been. The Princess almost smiled, a grim, forlorn sort of almost-smile. It was a morbid kind of grace.

The Queen's lips were not cold.

The Princess's heart was too heavy to be startled. She let her hands brush the Queen's brow, and drift over her dark hair. And she knew, before she could really know - the way we so often find ourselves knowing such things before we can really know them.

It wasn't until the Queen's eyelashes fluttered, and a puff of breath diluted the air they shared, that she really knew; but of course she knew before then. Perhaps she always knew.

And yet she couldn't have known, and didn't know - or possibly didn't know she knew. So when she saw it, or rather felt it, she gasped, and held the Queen's snowy-pale face in her shaking hands, and prayed that she had not been wrong in what she thought she knew.

She hadn't.

The Queen opened her eyes.

Liselotte had promised herself not to cry, because the Queen wouldn't have wanted her to, but now she felt hot tears falling from her cheeks onto the sheets.

When she blinked away the fog and looked up, the Queen was crying too, silently, almost smiling. Alive. She was alive.

And of course the Queen beckoned to the Princess to come close, and of course what she whispered to her, just barely loudly enough to hear, was _I love you_. And of course they started to laugh then, though their eyes were still watery, because the room was full of the most confused mourners one could imagine, and everyone had seen them kiss, and they couldn't have cared less.

Later, Liselotte would remember that moment, and think of her husband. Is this what he felt like, when he wore dresses to balls, when he showed off his lovers at court dinners? She had never asked him, had never imagined there could be anything like equivalence between them. A kind of love, but not alikeness. And yet... Now she felt as if she understood him, more than she ever had. It was a desire that united them - a need, a hunger. For what? Liberation - their life and love, their power in powerlessness, their most important thing. The thing he flaunted. The thing she treasured.

But that was later, and this was now.

Now, the Princess Liselotte, drunk on liberation, was kissing the Queen on the cheeks, on the lips... And now she was lifting her in her arms and holding her close, laughing, laughing.

Later, and forever after, everyone would call it a miracle, call it Providence, call it all sorts of things. Nobody would remember that the Princess had kissed the Queen; nobody would imagine that a Queen could kiss a Princess. Only the two of them - at that moment, and forever after - would know that no angel had saved her, no stroke of heavenly intervention. That theirs had always been a morbid sort of grace. That their miracle was everybody else's miracle, a banal, everyday wonder.

In the end, only they would know that it was nothing other than love, no more and no less.

In the end - and forever after.


End file.
